The years 1849 to 1853. Journey to Goulburn, where Darby Durack finds employment with James Chisholm of Kippilaw. Impressions and conditions of labour. The discovery of gold in ’51 and its effects upon the colony. Michael Durack and his family leave Ireland for New South Wales.
The carriages, overloaded with passengers and luggage, jolted and bogged on their way, over Razor Back Mountain, a two-day stage from the smokes and clamour of the town to where the old road swung south so that the ranges lay upon the west and rolling hills subsided to the coast.
Prepared for a land of perpetual sunshine, the immigrants found themselves exposed to wild rains and winds blowing bleakly from mountain snows, as cold or colder than any they had known. They found it no land for loving at first sight. Only time would make friends of the unbending gums whose branches with their thin perennial leaves spread stiffly above the reach of man. Familiarity would give shape and meaning to the twisting, tattered paperbarks and confusion of the lesser forest as it would bring joy of its bright, hard flowers and bright, harsh birds. A journey of 130 miles inland had seemed a great distance to the newcomers, not yet adjusted to the vast perspectives of this empty continent.
Incidents, soon to become the commonplace of everyday life, seemed perilous adventures—floating coaches on empty hogsheads across swollen streams or easing down steep inclines with logs hitched on behind; unharnessing the horses in drenching rain, the women and children sleeping, if sleep they could, inside the carriages, the men underneath on beds of canvas laid over heaps of bark.
The arrival of the immigrant coaches, rattling through the unmade streets, caused some stir in the little bush town on the edge of the great plain. To Darby Durack and his wife, Goulburn had seemed at first flat, crude and ugly with its slab-built, bark-roofed humpies and shanty hotels, its roads that were no more than winding waggon ruts, noisy and congested with creaking drays and bullock teams and herds of sheep and cattle being driven to the boiling-down works, whose pungent smell pervaded the atmosphere.
They could hardly have believed with what affection they would watch the little frontier town grow to a centre of importance and dignity—Goulburn, city of the big plains. Already it had become a lively focus for the roads of the south and south-western districts and for the surrounding bush community. Since its foundation in 1820 it had seen the growth of a great pastoral industry as well as some of the worst evils of the convict system, since the chain gang had been stationed for thirteen years at the Towang stockade, only six miles south. Public executions had been frequent during the twenties and thirties when corpses had been left to blacken on the gibbet on Gallows Hill. The triangle could still be seen in the town where Billy O’Rourke, ‘The Towang Flogger’, and the vicious negro ‘Black Francis’ had flaked the flesh from men’s backs so that if they lived to be free men they were branded as ‘shellbacks’ who had worn the yellow garb of misery and shame. Desperate men, goaded beyond endurance, had escaped into the bush and formed themselves into lawless bands that infested the southern roads, sticking up the mail coaches, robbing isolated settlements and molesting travellers. The hanging of Whitton, leader of the local outlaws, in Goulburn in 1840 had marked the end of that first era of bushranging, and it seemed then that the menace had been finally dealt with and the roads made safe for travellers. Its recurrence from another strata of society was not then foreseen.
So keen was the competition for labour at this time that a crowd had gathered at the immigrant reception depot for the arrival of the coaches. Squatters, for the most part big, bearded men in broad-brimmed cabbage-tree hats and moleskin trousers, smoking heavy pipes, flicking at the flies with the crops of their stockwhips, appraised the newcomers descending stiffly from the muddy carriages. The man who at once drew Darby and his wife aside was hardly typical of the early ‘squattocracy’, being tall, spare and clean-shaven except for side-whiskers, and of a quiet, considerate manner that contrasted with the bluff heartiness of the majority. In Darby he would have seen a strongly built young fellow, also clean-shaven at that time, with dark curly hair and clear-cut features, while his wife was a fresh-faced, capable-looking girl with a quirk of unfailing good humour about her mouth. A few formal questions and the couple found themselves engaged in the service of James Chisholm, clipping along beside him in his smart four-in-hand on the road to his Kippilaw estate.
They learned that their employer was not, as far as he knew, related to Caroline Chisholm, the Emigrants’ Friend, but he knew her well and proudly claimed her as a kinswoman. Unlike most big landholders of the time, he admired and approved her work, even her encouragement of small settlers, and did all he could to assist her, acting as treasurer of her fund for the Emigrant Friends’ Society in the Goulburn district. As time went on they would know much of the kindness and generosity of this man with whom they had been lucky enough to find a home. His father had come to the colony as a member of the New South Wales Corps but had avoided the disrepute of many members of that body during the years when rum, in the control of the army, was colonial currency. In the same way his son James had never earned the opprobrium attached to so many employers of convict labour. He had publicly denounced the flogging of minor offenders and the laying of trumped-up charges against more useful assigned convicts in order to prolong their servitude. Fortunate indeed had been the bond men and women assigned to Kippilaw, for Mr Chisholm and his good wife had helped many a lost soul to a new start in life. No bushranger ever molested his property or those belonging to it. Sometimes they had been held up on the road but when recognised had been allowed to keep their money and valuables and go on their way.
The estate of Kippilaw, spread about the fertile valley of the Wollondilly River at the head of the Hawkesbury, had begun as a cattle station in 1832, but was soon growing also wool, wheat and maize. The homestead enclosure, its lawns and gardens stretching to the river banks, was like a little village with a two-storey ‘Government House’ of white stone, its four wings surrounding a courtyard, convict-built with shingled roof, gables, long shuttered windows and creeper-shaded verandahs. Other buildings included a small stone church, stables, a store, a butchery and a blacksmith’s ‘shop’ and a long barracks that had housed assigned servants of earlier years and now accommodated free labourers. Married couples and their families occupied smaller stone buildings, each with kitchen-living-room below and loft above, equipped with straw palliasses for sleeping. It was one of these that became for some years the home of Darby and his Margaret and the birthplace of their first three Australian sons. James Chisholm had chosen wisely, for Darby was not one to break his contract and return to the huddle of the port town. He knew the value of these years at Kippilaw, learning how to work stock under Australian conditions, becoming accustomed to the climate and seasons of the southern hemisphere, saving from his princely wage of £40 a year, against the day when he would follow the advice of the solid old hands and ‘put everything into four legs’ and a good piece of land. Out of this wage he also managed to send home a regular remittance, at the same time urging his family to emigrate, but an underlying note of sadness in the letters did not escape his people. He felt obliged to explain that the young colony was in many ways a strange, harsh land where men and manners were very different from those of the old country. It was an uphill struggle to become one’s own master, and for this reason the would-be settler, fighting for a place in the sun, was aptly dubbed ‘a battler’. Agriculture was backward in the colony, for although most properties had their cultivated plots of barley, maize and vegetables, large-scale cultivation was difficult. Labour was not only short but expensive because every acre must first be cleared of heavy scrub and trees. Therefore men became graziers, using the unfenced virgin country for their stock in a free and easy style that was difficult to understand. Many of the big squatters and merchants, early on the scene, had become rich, but newcomers, without capital, could succeed only through great patience, hard work and the long-range plan.
Darby had been almost two years at Kippilaw when the colonial picture changed with dramatic suddenness. In May ’51 gold was discovered at the Turon and the tough, prosaic outpost of empire became a continent of fabulous romance.
In convict times Australian gold had been a whisper and a fear. The wealth of the colony was the golden fleece of her sheep and woe betide it if their shackled tenders should break to dig for treasure among the tumbled hills. A man who was warned to put away the nugget he had found lest the free men of the colony had their throats cut had prudently complied. When transportation ceased, Australian settlers, in their slough of despond, were too intent upon scanning the skies for rain and the press for news of better times to seek a glint of gold about their feet. Colourful stories of gold rushes in America had seemed a far cry from this humdrum south land until a man who had walked off his bankrupt property in ’48 and sailed to California one day looked up from washing dirt in the bed of Sacramento River and was reminded of the Bathurst scene he had left behind. If this was gold country—why not that? A simple-hearted fellow, he told everyone he met, all the way back to New South Wales and out on horseback across the mountains. Nobody paid much attention to his naive talk, but his hunch had not played him false. He found his gold in the first dishful he washed and the next and the next. And so a merry chain of campfires swung out from Sydney across the mountains to the plains beyond, the mushroom roaring canvas towns sprang up and the gold fever mounted to delirium. There was buried treasure in the river beds and among the sunbaked hills and valleys of this old-new land and quick as news could travel the word went round the world.
Darby Durack, coming in from Kippilaw for stores, saw men near mad in Goulburn the day the news came through. The big Scot McKensie, blowing on his pibroch like some outsize pied piper, had led off the first lot of diggers to a wild accompaniment of singing and shouting and waving of hats, leaving Goulburn like a plague spot, shops closed, houses deserted, the bootmaker’s bench unoccupied with a lady’s shoe upon the last, bread in the baker’s oven left to ruin. What a crazy march that had been—men and women, even children, goods and equipment piled into any sort of vehicle from a four-in-hand to a gin case on wheels!
It was not easy, in that moment of infectious excitement, when all over Australia men were exchanging their tools of trade for miner’s shovels and picks, and in Sydney entire crews were deserting their ships, to resist the temptation to join the rush to the Turon, but Darby, prudently weighing the risks against the value of a steady job and a good home for his family, carried on at Kippilaw. More than half Chisholm’s other labourers made off, and every shepherd on the place rolled his swag, whistled up his dogs and went on his way. All over the countryside the squatters met in frantic consultation. How to carry on? Optimists declared it a flash in the pan and predicted that before long the importunate fellows would be back again, caps in hand, begging for their old jobs. Others felt that a great tide of change had turned in the colony and that landholders must think up other ways and means of holding their flocks and working their runs.
In Goulburn excitement ebbed and flowed. Many after only a few weeks returned from the diggings, disillusioned, but there was scarcely a day without fresh rumours of gold in some new place that kept a section of the populace rushing from place to place like shuttle-cocks. Darby observed that, of them all, but a few made good: the majority would have done better to stay at home and attend to their ordinary work. He saw the gold rush as a madness that would pass and, sensitive of the Irish reputation for rashness and instability, took pride in keeping a cool head until things returned to normal. Some said, ‘He’s a steady fellow, that Irishman at Kippilaw. Chisholm’s lucky to have a chap like that,’ but many squatters were suspicious of a saving, steady labourer. ‘Give me the improvident fellow—the man who gambles or hands his cheque over the bar counter,’ they would say. ‘As long as he’s broke he’ll stick to the job, but once he has a few pounds put by he begins to fancy himself as a landholder.’
Pastoralists had talked big about Australia’s need for more people and more capital to swell the labour pool and raise the price of meat, but with the gold rush their wish came true with a vengeance. It was some twelve months after the discovery of gold before the first mining immigrants could reach Australian shores. By this time the southern portion of the colony, comprising about 87,900 square miles, had been declared the separate State of Victoria and more sensational gold finds around Ballarat had sent the gold seekers rushing in that direction. Rising 95,000 people flocked to Victoria from other parts of Australia in ’51 and 20,000 from overseas surged into Melbourne in September ’52. Thereafter immigrants swelled from a previous average of 500 to many thousands a month. The money and the population had materialised. Meat soared to the dizzy height of 5d a pound and all the produce of the land was in keen demand. So far so good, but where was the labour to replace the stockmen and the poor, rum-besotted shepherds who had rushed off at the first clarion call of gold? Soon it became apparent that what the landholder had gained on the roundabouts he had lost on the swings. The money he made he must now put into fences, since it soon became obvious that shepherds would be from henceforth an extinct race in the land, while an ever-hungrier pack of small men clamoured about the borders of his run.
Conflicting though the situation was, it emerged clearly enough that the day of the little man had dawned in the colony. Unable to realise the vastness of Australia and the potential of her still unopened wilderness, it seemed to the newcomer that all unclaimed land must soon run out in this latest scramble, and Darby Durack wrote entreating his family to delay no longer. Mr Chisholm had promised them all employment, but he was not one to stand in a man’s way when he wished to branch out for himself. In two years they might, between them, have saved enough to secure a small block and sufficient stock to make a modest start.
Up to this time Darby’s elder brother, Michael, shocked by stories of entire families dying on ‘coffin ships’ on the long voyage to the colonies, had been reluctant to leave his native land. Although his family, then numbering five girls and two boys, had survived the rigours of famine, some of them had been left far from strong. The fifth child, Sarah, seven years old when her uncle migrated to Australia, could not, they believed, have survived even a reasonable voyage and although ‘Mammie Amy Forde’ urged them to go, leaving the sickly child in her care, they clung on in the desperate hope of better times. The hope proved vain, for although the famine had lifted by ’48, its main causes—the wholesale evictions and land clearances—went on. Ireland sank deeper in the mire of pessimism and bitterness, the hatred of England and the landlords stronger than ever before. ‘To get up you must first get out,’ and everywhere deserted fields and the ruins of little homes betokened a broken-hearted land.
By the end of ’52 Michael Durack also faced the fact that he and his family must emigrate or starve, but they had virtually nothing with which to make even a small down payment on their fare. My grandfather Patsy, already introduced as the eldest son, who longed to join his uncle Darby in the golden colony of New South Wales, often told his children how chance had come to their assistance. The great Lord Dunraven of Adare, probably the father of the man who, some forty years later, was to join forces with other fighters in the cause of Irish liberty, was travelling to Limerick when his coach became embedded in the mire. Patsy, seventeen years old and deceptively strong for his light build, had put his shoulder under the hub of the vehicle and quickly had it free. The great man had called him back as he turned away and asked whether he was so rich that he had no need of a reward. Blushing with confusion, Patsy had declared himself the eldest son of a large family hoping soon to emigrate to Australia and dig for gold.
‘Then here’s a piece to go on with,’ said his Lordship, pressing a sovereign into the boy’s hand.
To one who had counted a few pence handsome payment for a day’s toil this was riches indeed, and it was not long before he had translated it into two hens, a sow and the present of a holy picture for each member of his family. He told his children in later years how that sovereign had proved a magic coin, for the hens laid well and the sow brought forth a fine litter, so that in twelve months there was enough money to bring them all to Australia. Besides this, little Sarah seemed stronger by the autumn of ’52 and the die was cast.
A prospect of exciting change and adventure for the young people, for their parents the leave-taking was fraught with grief and anxiety. Mammie Amy at the last refused to leave the now impoverished farm at Scariff. She would not desert the graves of her dead but would pray out her life for their souls and for those who had been spared to start life anew in distant lands. She had good friends left who would visit and care for her, and someday perhaps there would be a letter to say that one very dear had found that pot of gold she had dreamt of at the rainbow’s end.
So they were gathered at last, with a host of other migrating families guarding their bundles, the spinning wheels and wooden cradles and rocking chairs tied up together with their patched and homespun clothes, waiting in the cold for the sailing packet that would carry them to Plymouth on the first stage of their 13,000-mile journey to the strange south land.